Sherry Turckle :Connected, but alone?
Sherrie Turckel a cultural analyst studying technology and science, does a talk in a TED conference “Connected, But Alone?”
She talks about how she loves receiving texts from her daughter but too many becomes a problem? How exactly?
Sherrie makes a case that we are letting technology take us to a place we don’t want to go, setting ourselves up for trouble as to say. Devices are not just changing what we do but their changing who we are, things we do on our devices now would have being odd a few years back, but now they are familiar to us.
She states that we remove ourselves from parts of situations we don’t want to be in and immerse ourselves into our phones.
The trouble is coming from how we relate to others but also ourselves and our self-reflection. Were used to being alone together, to be with each other but elsewhere. We find ourselves hiding from each other even though we are constantly connected technologically.
Sherrie talks about a theory she has devised talking to different
Generations. This is called the ‘goldilocks effect’: people cant get enough of each other but only at a distance so they can control it. The goldilocks effect shows that we don’t want people too close or too far but just right.
However the problem occurs here when we realize what might be just
right for you may not be right for an adolescent human needing the
skills of face-to-face communication.
Sherrie asks an question that receives an interesting response, what is wrong with a conversation? She got a reply that didn’t necessarily shock me but made me think in a way id never thought of before...
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with having a conversation. It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.”
That’s the bottom line
Texting and email and all these digital commutations, they let us present ourselves as we want to be, we can edit, delete, “we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.”
“That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology. That’s why it’s so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed -- so many automatic listeners. And the feeling that no one is listening to me make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.”
The idea of people being able to control what they say online but also edit their personality, their look and their voice, this is the idea of a catfish relationship, creating virtual self to portray a person that people would want to listen to, hence the idea of documenting things constantly and making the thing you document admirable along with your life.
